You Report, We Decide

DAVE DAVIES: I wish I knew how many hundreds of thousands of federal tax dollars have been spent investigating the New Black Panther Philadelphia voter intimidation case. We can add a few more, now that the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility has completed its review of the department’s handling of the matter. On election day in 2008, a pair of African-American guys wearing berets stationed themselves in front of a North Philadelphia polling place, calling themselves “security.” One of them had a nightstick. Though the beret boys didn’t interfere with ingress or egress from the polling place and not a single voter can be identified who was intimidated by their idiotic behavior, conservatives have been flogging the issue ever since. MORE

PHAWKER: Before Fox News started using this non-incident to scare white viewers — and the Justice Department spent a King’s Ransom worth of allegedly scarce tax dollars investigating this non-incident, and then investigating their investigation of this non-incident, all at the behest of faux-outraged conservative talking heads — The New Black Panther Party commanded a following that numbered in the tens. Please stop feeding the trolls.

RELATED: In the final stretch of the 2008 campaign, a Fox News executive repeatedly questioned on the air whether Barack Obama believed in socialism. Now it turns out he didn’t really believe what he was saying. Bill Sammon, now the network’s vice president and Washington managing editor, acknowledged the following year that he was just engaging in “mischievous speculation” in raising the charge. In fact, Sammon said he “privately” believed that the socialism allegation was “rather far-fetched.” MORE

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